Dispatch (20 page)

"I'm not coming back!" she announced as she opened the car door and threw the suitcase in the backseat.

"Vicki..."

"I'm not coming back!" She glared at me with a face full of rage and pain and hate.

And fear.

It wasn't just Kyoko.

"I'm sorry!" I called out lamely.

"I don't know
what
you are! But I don't want to be around you, and I don't want you to be around my son!"

"He's my son, too!" I shouted as she got in the car and slammed the door. "I'm the one who's with him all day! I'm the one who takes care of him!"

I was still screaming at her as she backed out of the driveway, swung the car around in the street and sped away.
 

I dreamed of the tent again, the circus tent in the desert. Once more, I was walking alone down the dusty road toward the tent. There was no movement of the hot still air, not even a breeze, but the dirty white-and-red-striped canvas flap flipped open as though propelled by a sentient wind. Within the exposed triangular breach lay darkness.

I reached the tent and did not even pause. I walked straight inside.

There were no white-haired children within the canvas confines, no prehistoric skeleton. In the center of the ring was the crucified Christ, his body dead and stinking on the cross, blood dried and skin turned to leather. From somewhere unseen came the tinny sound of old-time music. Two old men sat in the shadowed bleachers, scribbling on notepads or clipboards.

I awoke.

And I was alone in my bed. I rolled over and buried my face in Vicki's pillow. I could still smell her on it: her perfume, her shampoo, her moisturizer, her soap. "Vicki," I said.

And cried myself to sleep.

In the mail the next day was a letter with no return address. Just in case, I ripped open the envelope:

Dear Jason,

You are walking down a dusty desert road toward the red-and-white striped circus tent. It is hot and you are sweating, but inside you feel cold—

The end of our marriage was conducted through a series of letters. From her lawyer to me, from my lawyer to her. I tried writing to Vicki directly, pouring my heart and soul into a series of personal entreaties designed to win her back, giving those letters everything I had. She returned every one of them—unopened. Either she knew what I was trying to do, or on some subliminal level, she sensed it.

I don't know
what
you are.

Eric called me on the phone every few days, and each time he was polite but distant. I could tell he was sad, and I wondered what Vicki had told him about me. I didn't want to ask him, and I
couldn't
ask her, because she wouldn't speak to me. I knew from her lawyer that she was asking for full custody and that she wanted to deny me visitation rights, but my lawyer said there was no way that would happen. She'd probably get custody, he admitted—the mother usually did—but I was such an involved father that it was likely I would have a pretty open visitation schedule.

That wouldn't do me much good, though, if they remained in Arizona.

Unless I moved to Arizona.

What would be best for Eric? I wondered. I wasn't so selfish that I would gratify my own emotional needs at the expense of his, but I found it hard to believe that he'd be better off without a father in his life.

I remembered that when I was a little boy, my friends never liked to come over to my house and I never liked to invite them. My dad was often drunk, and my mom was always mean. So mean that my friends were afraid of her and would rather meet anyplace in town other than my house.

Vicki and I had been good parents to Eric—at least until this point—and we needed to continue putting him first. But this was not an ordinary separation. We were playing it as though it were, and that's how it appeared from the outside—the Kyoko letters assured at least that much—but the truth was that Vicki was
afraid
of me. I'd known it that night, and I sensed it even now. She obviously couldn't prove anything—any assertion that I was an unusually successful letter writer would seem like irrelevant lunacy—but we both knew the truth of the situation, and I could understand her point of view. Hell, my letter writing scared
me
. I knew why she wanted to keep Eric away from me.

She was letting him call, though. At least that was something.

Maybe all wasn't lost.

I thought at some point we would have to meet in a room: her and her lawyers, me and mine. But apparently not. The haggling over details continued through faxes and phone calls, through e-mails and couriers and registered letters. I still loved her, and I had an unfounded gut feeling that underneath all of the fear and suspicion and sense of betrayal, she still loved me, too. But all of this ... process ... kept us away from each other, pushed us further and further apart until we were little more than cogs in a machine. I did some of my best work writing letters to her lawyers, hitting heights of persuasiveness that I'd never hit before, pushing my abilities to their extremes in a desperate effort to get back my wife and son. If I'd been this on fire when writing about Reagan or Bush or Clinton, world events would have changed; the society we lived in would have shifted direction. But these letters, too, were returned unopened. I was allowed to communicate to Vicki's legal team only through my own attorneys.

I tore the letters up each time they were returned, and whether or not it was my imagination, I thought I sensed their power in my fingertips as I ripped up the paper on which they were printed. It was stupid and superstitious, but just in case, in a primitive homegrown attempt to ward off any repercussions, I dumped some of the torn pieces in the wastepaper basket in my office, dumped some more in the garbage sack under the kitchen sink and flushed the rest down the toilet. The ritual may not have had any real-world effects, but it made me feel better.

The summer dragged on, hot and lonely. I still said hello to my neighbors when I saw them, but I saw them less and less, hid out in my office more and more often, not doing my work, not even writing really, just obsessing over my situation and reading editorial pages, advice columns and epistolary novels. Letters real and fictional. For the first time since we'd moved into the neighborhood, I avoided the Fourth of July block party, not wanting to face my neighbors alone without my family, too embarrassed to answer questions.

I soon came to realize that most of "our" friends were actually Vicki's friends. I didn't really know most of them all that well and didn't really want to know them. My own friends from the past had fallen by the wayside; I'd drifted away from my college buddies just as I had earlier with Robert and Edson and Frank.

Where was I going? I wondered. What was to become of me? I had no idea. And the summer continued on.
 

In a portent of the bursting tech bubble to come, my job disappeared along with my stock options, my pension plan and the software company itself. I had no other income and virtually no savings, so I should have been more concerned about it, should have at least cared a
little
, but the truth was that my mind was wrapped up in the pending divorce and custody battle, and I was glad to be shed of the position. I'd hated it anyway, and the assignments that had been piling up had been an albatross around my neck.

As it happened, I was offered a new job almost immediately.

In a most unusual way.

Monday, August 25. A letter arrived in the mail describing in perfect detail the bizarre and terrifying dream I'd had the night before. In the dream, Eric had been at school, and during recess had eaten a small section of the chain link fence that surrounded the playground, then had moved on to the bottom segment of sheet metal on the slide. His teacher had dragged him to the principal's office, and the principal had called us. Both the teacher and the principal were there, and both were obviously afraid of Eric, who sat in a chair in the corner, chastised and worried. He was suspended for a week, and we took him home.

He went back to his bedroom.

"First the nails, now this! What is he?" Vicki demanded.

"Shut up," I told her. "He'll hear you."

"Whatever he is, it comes from you. Nothing like that's ever happened in my family."

"Nothing like this has ever happened in
anyone's
family."

"It's in your genes," she said angrily. "It's your fault."

I stood, suddenly furious. "You want to have a DNA test? Huh? You want to find out once and for all whose
fault
it is?" I grabbed her shoulders and shook her, and at that moment I hated her. "Is that how you think of our son? As someone one of us is at 'fault' for?"

She burst into tears. "I'm sorry!"

We hugged, made up, then walked back to his bedroom to talk to him. He was standing in his underwear before the full-length mirror on his closet door, a screwdriver in his hand. We weren't sure at first what he was looking at or what he was planning to do, but then I noticed that his skin had started to change.

Barely noticeable, it began as a slight discoloration around the ankles. Yet even as we watched, it spread. Vicki gasped as a thin gray tendril moved up his leg and formed a spot on his thigh roughly the size, shape and color of a quarter.

"I'll be metal by morning," he said, and smiled. He lifted the screwdriver to his lips and bit off its tip. "I'm going to eat the car tonight."

The letter quoted every bit of dialogue and described every detail I remembered. As before, the effect sent a chill down my spine.

But this time there was another sheet of paper enclosed with it.

A job application.

I read it over. Once. Twice. Thrice. It was, by far, the simplest and strangest application I had ever seen. My name, address, birth date and Social Security number had already been filled in on the top lines. Below that were two questions I was apparently required to answer:
What qualifies you to be a professional Letter Writer?
and
If hired, how many letters would you be able to write, on average, in an eight-hour period?
At the bottom was a line for my signature.

At the top was the address of the company.

There was no name. That was odd. But at least I now knew where these mysterious letters had been coming from. Apparently, there was a business whose mission was to simply write letters.

And now they wanted me to work for them.

It could be a trap, I reasoned.

No. A person or persons who not only knew where I lived but could see into my mind and know my dreams would have the ability to capture me or take me out at any time. They wanted something else. Perhaps this
was
nothing more than a simple job offer. Perhaps the company was expanding. Or needed additional manpower for some secret project, some big letter-writing campaign that had as its goal the overthrow of the United States government or something equally ambitious. Or...

What?

I didn't know.

Whatever the reason, the company had given me its address, if not its name, and obviously wanted me to either write back or show up in person—and that was why I was tempted not to. These letters had been dogging me for years, freaking me out, worrying me, making me second-guess myself, and this was an opportunity for a little payback. The thought of some smug asshole sitting there and stewing in his own juices while waiting for a visit from me that would never come filled me with a kind of cruel joy.

But I could not turn down this opportunity. There was some type of connection here. Beyond the letters, beyond the dreams, I was linked to these other Letter Writers somehow. I could feel it, an almost tangible bond that made me think of the pseudopsychic attachment that twins were supposed to share. Besides, I knew that if I didn't act now, the company could be gone, relocated to some other building in some other city—and next time there might not be a return address. This could very well be my one and only chance.

Did I want to go? No, not really. To be honest, the thought frightened me. But I
had
to do it, and I locked up the house, got in my car and drove to AAA, where I asked for a street map of Los Angeles.
 

I parked across the street. Sat there for a few minutes.

It was not a high-rise office building in the downtown area, not a new corporate center in the renovated hinterlands. It was a dingy apartment complex in a fading section of the city, a square two-story structure from the dawn of the space age, with two star-shaped dingbats affixed to the graffitied stucco testifying to its optimistic origin in an earlier innocent time. The name of the complex—
Shangri-La
—was written in stylized letters above a rusted wrought iron gate that provided entrance to what had once been the pool area. This interior courtyard had long since been cemented over, and was now home to what appeared to be a couple of dead potted palms, a few snapped-strap lounge chairs and some broken children's toys.

All this I could see from the driver's window of my car. What I could not see was the door for suite 3. Or, more accurately, apartment number 3.

I remained there, watching, hoping to catch a glimpse of someone going in or coming out, wishing I had a pair of binoculars so I could examine the apartment building more carefully. I was afraid to get out of the car, afraid to draw any closer. I'd been invited here, but just knowing that somewhere within that dingy complex were Letter Writers who were able to see my dreams, who had been dogging me for over a decade, left me practically paralyzed with dread. I kept hoping others would show up. Other Letter Writer applicants. Anyone.

When it became clear that there was only me, I sat there for a little while longer, then got out of the car. A block up the street, a group of kids were racing up and down the sidewalk on their bikes. Closer in, a disheveled man pushed a grocery cart filled with recyclable cans and bottles.